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Tactical usage of numerical scores

Just a thought, but has RPS ever considered giving games numerical scores based solely/mostly upon consumer friendliness? I'm not generally a fan of ratings, but given the increasing influence that Metacritic scores seem to have over publishers, it might serve as a small incentive for them to have less severe DRM and be a little more honest in general (especially if a few other websites followed suit).

You could subtract points for infractions such as DRM (probably with a sliding scale for severity), multiplayer games not allowing for private servers and lying about/misrepresenting the game while awarding points for things like mod support and comprehensive graphical settings.

Just a thought, but has RPS ever considered giving games numerical scores based solely/mostly upon consumer friendliness? I'm not generally a fan of ratings, but given the increasing influence that Metacritic scores seem to have over publishers, it might serve as a small incentive for them to have less severe DRM and be a little more honest in general (especially if a few other websites followed suit).

You could subtract points for infractions such as DRM (probably with a sliding scale for severity), multiplayer games not allowing for private servers and lying about/misrepresenting the game while awarding points for things like mod support and comprehensive graphical settings.

On a scale of Orange to 76, I give this a rating of Q.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

There's also the issue of a bad game that's super-nice to the consumer. Do you give it a high score? No you don't -- that would be misleading, and then you inevitably have to start factoring in the quality of the game into the score and the consumer friendliness system falls apart.

That said, Able Gamers (http://www.ablegamers.com) review games solely on how accessible they are, and their system works quite well if you know that going in.

No ratings, never. Games are not cars. If you're too lazy to read a text and comprehend the presented arguments as to why a certain game is a piece of shit (or not) then work on your attention span.

Normally I would argue with you about how we exist in a far more information-rich environment than ever before and therefore have to be a lot more selective about attaching importance to bits of information, which old people and indiscriminate cynics like to pretend is the malady of a diminishing attention span.

But that doesn't really hold here. The writers of RPS are mostly competent, and capable of making a case for why a thing is important in the opening statement. Plus if you're interested in a game, then information about that game will be important, so why would you want to skip it?

No ratings, never. Games are not cars. If you're too lazy to read a text and comprehend the presented arguments as to why a certain game is a piece of shit (or not) then work on your attention span.

Apparently you were too lazy to read my post. I wasn't proposing the ratings as a measure of a games quality, but as a means to discourage anti consumer practices by hitting publishers in the only place where it seems they can feel pain (i.e. the metacritic score).